Interesting. Skimmed over the article, and it doesn't seem to disclose how he intercepted SSL, if he did so.
Its an interesting read. Lots of stuff similar to Backtrack forums every day. The public really doesn't have a clue how weak their security practices are. Here is an interesting and quite true story (not my story but I could do it easily). Sitting at a coffee shop and hack into Email/Facebook of a patron sitting there. Decide to send them a post warning them that they are hacked and even where they are sitting - exactly. Dazed and flustered they shut down their laptop. Within minutes they are back on and didn't change any practice or show any further security concerns. Can you believe that? Its a true story.
Many public wifi's do not have any encryption turned on they are unsecured. When you connect to the network you are connecting to a gateway managed by a third party company, all the users use the same username and password to connect to that gateway. I am quite sure these company's are monitoring all traffic. A typical example of such a company, http://air2data.com/ The only way to ensure they are not monitoring your traffic is to use end to end encryption, vpn's etc.